economy

Tunisia has traditionally been perceived as a paragon of good practices in logistics in the MENA region. According to the Logistic Performance Index 2012, Tunisia is the best performer within the MENA region with a score of 3.17 over 5 (after U.A.E and Saudi Arabia) when Egypt scored at 2.98, Morocco 3.03 and Algeria 2.41. Tunisia also performs better than the regional benchmark countries in the trading-across-borders ranking of the Doing Business indicator. Tunisia is ranked 40th, far before Turkey (67th rank), Morocco (72nd rank) and Algeria (122nd rank).

At the same time, many importers in Tunisia complain about the inefficiency of Radès, the main Tunisian port, corruption in customs, and so on-- apparently with good reasons: dwell time, which is a good proxy for logistics efficiency, is benchmarked at around 3-4 days in middle income countries, whereas in Radès dwell time is officially around 6 days and more than 9 days according to the recent Tunisia investment climate assessment (with high dispersion), making it comparable to Mombasa in Kenya and much worse than a port like Durban in South Africa.